Don Jose's hypocrisy runs deeper than the obvious irony of condemning militarism while raising a regiment: he also helped instigate the Ribierist revolution, and his gun-running intrigues in peacetime precipitated the Monterist war. This paragraph praising Don Jose, while containing hidden references to undermine him, is an example of how Conrad presents a sanitized "official" history at odds with the facts.

As a side note, "trembling balance" is a slight misquote of the phrase at the top of the chapter. It is the invariable rule in Nostromo that no quote is ever quite correct, signifying the errors inherent in subjectivity.